Randy, many of those "standard" RSS 2.0 elements -- item/pubDate, item/source, item/author -- are simply reformulations of Dublin Core elements. Dublin Core is a worldwide standard for metadata (it's actually an ISO standard now) and is used in many many HTML, XML, and RDF vocabularies.

Furthermore, Dublin Core predates the introduction of those elements into the 0.9x branch of RSS, so one could make the opposite case that Dave's RSS feed is the one that is "funky", and does not respect ISO standards.

Regardless of how you look at it, Sam's assertion is correct. The feeds produced by Movable Type are valid and conform to every aspect of the RSS 2.0 spec, as published at http://backend.userland.com/rss . The spec specifically states that any RSS 2.0 feed may use any element from any namespace for any reason whatsoever. It does not define what is or is not "funky"; that's just one vendor's opinion.

RSS is dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.

...and from the XML 1.0 specification:

Violations of well-formedness constraints are fatal errors.

...and:

Once a fatal error is detected, however, the processor must not continue normal processing

There is no wiggle room here, if what Sam states is true, and the feeds are not well-formed, the result is not valid XML 1.0 or RSS 2.0, and should not be processed. Anything else is in direct violation of the specification.

Sam, that was not a postulation. I had a short e-mail conversation with Dave on this subject (cordial, but short and to the point) and he said his statement was based on his MT weblog. He also said he hadn't seen the RSS 2.0 feed.

I'm curious to how many aggregators support <guid isPermalink="true"> over the mainstay <link> tag. It would be useful to know in light of the concern for breaking aggregators with an optional namespace.

Plat goes Splat

Trying out Aggreg8, I discovered that Mark Pilgrim (or rather, his evil twin) has made his RSS feed particularly annoying for lowly aggregators that try to display HTML content in the feed's description element...
[more]

Trust boundaries

Mark Pilgrim: And now that RSS is moving into the mainstream, the design decisions that got it there are becoming more and more of a problem. It looks like my comment system was tested, and this time at least, it passed. Combinations of tags and ...

Sam, why not just ask Dave? I'd think he'd answer if he has time and doesn't think his answer will cause the blogoverse to explode in questions about his parentage (at the least I'd think.) I could guess that the use of some rdf and additional...

Mark Pilgrim trained the attack platypus

The attack platypus described earlier was an intentional RSS exploit by Mark Pilgrim, an inventive demonstration that news aggregators which don't filter HTML are open to abuse. If I was going to illustrate an RSS exploit on my audience, I don't ...

In fact, I can't help but wonder if Dave ever tried to contact Ben&Mena, and explain what about their feed could be improved for the purposes of interop. As far as I know, no user of Radio UserLand's aggregator has every complained about Mark's RSS 2.0 feed... until today.

(BTW, my hacked RSS feed has nothing to do with this thread, and people who claim otherwise have simply jumped to the wrong conclusion. It arose out of a discussion with Joe of http://bitworking.org/ about his new comment posting system.)

I did not test a security vulnerability today; I did not expose anyone's computer to harm. I added styles to my feed, CSS styles, which several programs displayed (as they are designed to do). It is true that this led to a larger discussion of the potential to use similar means to exploit security vulnerabilities, and that's an important discussion to have, but I did not in any way put computers at risk (as others have suggested in other forums).

Exploits

Dave writes: you shouldn't report security vulnerabilities by exploiting them on a mass scale, if you're a professional. What Mark did was a demonstration of an exploit, not an actual exploit. He gave us a vivid example of exactly what could happen...

Having others do your RSS research for you

Articles titled “How to consume RSS safely?” are useful when your dissertation project is all about RSS, but somehow this has been turned into ammunition for yet another RSS flame war. Weak analogy: conducting flame wars over multiple...

Mark, I can't participate in your discussion at this time. I just moved, and I have a backlog of essays to publish, and a lot of users to support. Luckily I have a net connection because one of my neighbors has WiFi. Also, I really dislike these arguments, maybe you can find someone else to argue with?? I thought you didn't like arguing with me either, and if so, why don't we stop arguing? Peace, Dave

Sat 14 Jun 2003

Xian, seems don't make it so. The SixApart people know what I mean, if they've been reading the emails, and if you're willing to do a little reading of archives of my weblog, you can find out too. It's often amazing (to me only) how ready people are to judge and believe things like "seems" and are so unwilling to do just the tiniest bit of digging. BTW, I'm entitled to believe and say something is funky and I don't have to explain. And some things are better because they're funky. Maybe I just wanted to mark a place in time without getting flamed by the usual suspects and look back a couple of years from now and point out where a little working together would have made the world a better place. Anyway, I refuse to get into an argument over this, or an argument over how it seems to you Christian. Peace be with you brother, god bless you, me and Tiny Tim.

An example. George Clinton is funky. Imagine what he would look like in a suit and tie with a haircut. So are the Neville Brothers.

Hey Pocky Way: "The Neville Brothers certainly qualify. It's even better if it has a funky beat, because that puts the smile on your face right away. The funkiness is the smile... Get it?"

BTW, do you know how funny it is to say my involvement here is hit-and-run. Here let me laugh. Hehehe. I've been dancing to this beat for seven g'dd'm years Christian. What were you doing in 1997? I was doing this stuff.

Dave, I for one don't get it. I said so in the blog entry that started this thread. Two days and 42 comments later, and I still don't get it. Why not identify what is funky? We have two or three different theories... why make us guess?

Flying back across the country, I had some time to think. I'm a bit troubled by the lack of forward motion lately in RSS. Profiles? Stalled. Namespace? Stalled.

I dont claim to know Dave very well, but it seemed to me from the start that he was just waxing centrist and really wasnt making a diehard claim about MT not supporting RSS standards. Maybe Im wildly off base, but that seems to happen here and there. Whatever, its a sideshow.

MT currently generates compliant RSS out of the box. What more is there to ruminate over, whats to be gained?

Sam I don't want to argue about it, and getting into the details certainly would get into an argument. Today is the first anniversary of my almost dying of heart disease, and it probably had a lot to do with exactly this kind of stress. So I'm going to insist that you cut me some slack this one time. Thanks.

And as I said, the info is on Scripting News, frankly I don't see why you asked the question at all, just go read the site and you'll find out what I think.

Why I called Movable Type's RSS support "funky"

Dave has mentioned that a read through the syndication mail list will illuminate.

To that end, I have collected all the links I could find related to the development of the RSS specification, from the release by Netscape in March 1999 through the release of the RSS 1.0 Proposal in August 2000. The "beginnings of the RSS fork" that covers the time before Mark Pilgrim's History of the RSS fork.

The more substantive links are arranged by date, and the whole collection as plain-text files are a available as a .zip or .tgz file, released into the Public Domain.

Sun 15 Jun 2003

Does funky mean wrong?

Not funky

Here's a start on Steve Pilgrim's request. This one will work, but is no where near complete. Could someone do the pubDate and the other elements I'm missing? I could guess, but I don't have MT installed and available. We also need someone to come...

Does funky mean wrong?

Quote Apparently, there has been quite a chit-chat going on in the comments at Sam Roby's site. The 49 (at last count) comments surround this entry. [cut] Will somebody kindly step through the fog and say, "if you want your RSS feed to be right,...

Despite what Dave apparently told Brad offline, I'm coming to the conclusion that the issue is the use of dc:date instead of pubDate. As near as I can tell this produces no incompatibilities with any Radio product, so I don't understand the issue. Meanwhile, I agree with Mark Pilgrim that ISO dates are more consumer friendly.

Could be dc:date versus pubDate, could be autodiscovery and link going to RSS 1.0, could be the existence of RSS 1.0 at all, could be the assumption that TypePad will prominently feature RSS 1.0, could be content:encoded versus encoded content in description, could be excerpts versus full posts, could be an attempt to present a united front against the new version of Blogger Pro producing RSS 1.0, could be meat, could be cake.

I've been in relationships before where I was supposed to guess what the other person wanted me to do. Past tense.

Decoding Dave Winer

Linux for Poets

The support staff at Rack Force was kind enough to install Webmin (an open source system management tool) for me since I couldn't use Plesk. It's not as commercial or smooth as Plesk, or CPanel, or Ensim, but it provides all the services I could...
[more]

Your strength in the weblog / RSS world is how fast you can move, not how close you can stand together. Sheesh, any big company could buy all the players in this niche with a couple hours' worth of revenue! The more this stuff is a commodity, the more easily it can be bought and sold, or ripped and replaced, or simply made irrelevant by new features in Windows, Office, IE, Google, Java, or whatever.

You folks just keep up the good work of innovation and experimentation! If you keep things reasonably simple, interoperability will take care of itself if there is the will to do so. That lets good ideas like the Comment API Sam discussed recently prolferate, and bad ideas like [oops, no flames :-)] die out, unhindered by gatekeepers, whether they be standards committees or Godfathers.

Mon 16 Jun 2003

RSS Nonsense

Tue 17 Jun 2003

"Funky" RSS

Dave Winer fairly recently commented that the RSS feed produced by MT blogs was "funky" - this wasn't a positive statement.Anyway, the upshot is that those statements are being discussed all over the place - here for instance in a fairly sane manner...

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Specs

Aaron Swartz weighs in on the funky RSS debate.QuoteDave Winer says Movable Type’s RSS is funky because an out-of-the-box MT blog comes with an RSS 1.0 and an RSS 2.0 feed. I don't think Dave said this at all. What we have is one camp avoiding a...

What is funky

I you read Dave's Scripting News blog, he's pointing out what is funky and what is not. He makes it pretty clear that it's alternate elements (not in the RSS 2.0 spec) being used instead of good old RSS 2.0 elements. For example dc:date instead of...

Modern aggregators know that it's just data, and use whatever dateish data they get, whatever creatorish data they get, and so on. Older aggregators for the most part didn't even try to deal with dates and authors. The only two classes of people I feel sorry for are Radio users, since the last I heard (Radio refuses to open in Firebird on this computer, so I can't check myself) its support for content:encoded got broken along the way, so they just get short plain-text descriptions from feeds like mine, and people who've failed to realize that this whole "funky" conversation is about politics, not technology. I've had to calm the fears of several people who thought that their feed was somehow defective, in some secret but should be obvious to them way. That saddens me, because what little fun there is in these specturbation conversations goes away once what we're saying gets interpreted as FUD by people who have the right to expect better of us.

More Funk

Ok, I can understand and agree that dc:date is funky when used in place of pubDate. That's because dc:date provides nothing that pubDate can't provide. Now Winer seems to be suggesting that all RSS extensions are funky. Surely the...

Yes, "apparently", but I don't see any other candidates for 'three bits of funk' other than the blogChannel namespace declaration plus the two namespaced elements blogChannel:blogRoll and blogChannel:mySubscriptions. Do you?

If I'm correct, then Dave is not only calling elements that replace roughly equivalent optional RSS 2.0 elements (like dc:creator vs. author) 'funky', but any extension of RSS using namespaces, even an extension he originated.

None of this gives me warm fuzzies. This feels like the sort of trial balloon a BigCo sends up to check whether they can get away with something. I don't think that's what Dave is doing, but it still feels that way.

"""If they [Blogger and MT] want respect for the formats and protocols they implement, they must do RSS exactly as UserLand does. The thing that Blogger and MT currently call RSS is not only not what UserLand does but it isn't even an improvement over what UserLand does."""

I'm sick of this. I'm sick of RSS. I'm sick of this debate. Really sick of it. The minute a viable alternative to RSS 0.9x/1.0/2.0/3.0/4.0 emerges, I will support it exclusively and deprecate every single one of my RSS feeds. There will be breakage. Serious breakage. But it will be worth it if it means I never have to talk about RSS again.

I'm not hopeful that a viable alternative to RRS will emerge, unless the W3C or a similar body takes it on board and puts energy into creating momentum for the new standard.

Sadly, as RSS becomes more widely used, inertia comes into play, and I can understand that some groups and individuals are reluctant to change to something else. But with four dialects to support (and more on the way I suppose), what the heck, you might as well support another one, right?

Its a shame that innovation in RSS has been totally killed by the political strife, RSS 1.0 had real potential to be an interesting format if it hadn't been sabotaged.

But if you're sick of the conversation, disengage, stop paying attention to all the various RSS conversations. Check back a year or two from now, I promise your RSS will still be valid, and you'll still be on the cutting edge.

It is sort of like any other forms of activism, you've got to disengage to step back and look at all you've accomplished. And by any sane standards, RSS (and your and Sam's contributions to RSS) is a success. You just don't see it when you're on the front lines.

Fri 20 Jun 2003

ESF

Paul "From The Orient" Freeman: I support ESF. And Aaron's lovely RFC822 style. My problem with both is that they don't support the ability for spontaneous experimentation that you can do with XML and namespaces.

What I wrote was part a joke (I'm not likely to give up using RSS any time soon) and part a statement of my dislike of all this funky/non-funky stuff. (I also wasn't paying attention and didn't expect the except to appear here; I didn't trackback you as I didn't really think it justified it).

Anyway, I am likely wrong because Dave Winer hasn't explained exactly what funky is, but I get the impression that the use of namespaces is what is funky, so by that definition, you can add RSS 2.0 to ESF and Aaron's RFC822.

Sun 22 Jun 2003

Replacing RSS

Mon 23 Jun 2003

Wow

A week ago I quietly introduced a wiki to discuss the anatomy of a well formed log entry. It got a lot of interest. And a week later, it is still being actively developed. Wow. It seems that I am not the only one desiring a bit of forward motion in ...

dc:date funky - yeah!

Tue 24 Jun 2003

RSS Readers by Martin Hitz

As blogging is still somewhat arcane to most continental Europeans, RSS readers remain mostly unknown here. Martin Hitz just wrote a great article about that topic in yesterday's NZZ: Weniger surfen RSS-Reader als Ergänzung zum Browser Just one...

Thu 26 Jun 2003

Politics

From Mark Pilgrim weblog: "My support is, unsurprisingly, also partly based on politics. The recent flap about “funky RSS” just highlights the ongoing political quagmire of weblog tech, and the importance of having an open format that is not...

Fri 27 Jun 2003

Setting a few things straight

Dave is providing feedback. Here's my responses: I have a policy. This weblog will follow this this roadmap. The serialization format won't be ready until July, at the earliest There is a single place. Now, onto more general topics. This is clearly ...

Mon 07 Jul 2003

Mr. Safe and the Standards Body

Wed 09 Jul 2003

Forward Motion

In the wake of the last RSS debacle -- in which RSS's vendor dependence was made perfectly clear when Dave Winer claimed (2) Movable Type's implementation of RSS to be "funky" -- the Usual Suspects have launched a (nameless) initiative to define:...

Fri 11 Jul 2003

WS DevCon: Dave Winer

Dave Winer gave this morning's keynote. I'd never seen him in person, and he seems like a decent guy---certainly a far cry from the screeds he's left on various weblogs and mailing lists. Unsurprisingly, he made reference to the whole......
[more]

If there's anything I've learned from email and online posting, it's this - it is far, far easier to be rude (and/or be taken as rude) in a posted forum. In person, you see the other person's reactions, and modulate yourself accordingly. When writing, it's much harder to do that - because the reaction comes afterwards.

Wed 06 Aug 2003

Tech Niggles, Part 2

Fri 08 Aug 2003

Dave Winer: I read a piece yesterday about SixApart and their standards compliance. Interesting, but they do RSS in a funky way. I don't get it. I've looked at MovableType's RSS 2.0 template. It is valid. It provides a...

Sat 09 Aug 2003

The day the blogging died http://radiofreeblogistan.com/2003/07/31/the_day_the_blogging_died.html Blogistan PieA long, long time agoI can still rememberHow those weblogs used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chanceI could make the...

The day the blogging died http://radiofreeblogistan.com/2003/07/31/the_day_the_blogging_died.html Blogistan PieA long, long time agoI can still rememberHow those weblogs used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chanceI could make the...

The day the blogging died http://radiofreeblogistan.com/2003/07/31/the_day_the_blogging_died.html Blogistan PieA long, long time agoI can still rememberHow those weblogs used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chanceI could make the...

The day the blogging died http://radiofreeblogistan.com/2003/07/31/the_day_the_blogging_died.html Blogistan PieA long, long time agoI can still rememberHow those weblogs used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chanceI could make the...

Mon 11 Aug 2003

The day the blogging died http://radiofreeblogistan.com/2003/07/31/the_day_the_blogging_died.html Blogistan PieA long, long time agoI can still rememberHow those weblogs used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chanceI could make the...

The day the blogging died http://radiofreeblogistan.com/2003/07/31/the_day_the_blogging_died.html Blogistan PieA long, long time agoI can still rememberHow those weblogs used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chanceI could make the...

Thu 09 Oct 2003

Forward Motion

In the wake of the last RSS debacle -- in which RSS's vendor dependence was made perfectly clear when Dave Winer claimed (2) Movable Type's implementation of RSS to be "funky" -- the Usual Suspects have launched a (nameless) initiative to define: what a weblog post constitutes a new weblog......
[more]

Sun 02 Nov 2003

What Goes Around

Wed 28 Jan 2004

XML DevCon: Dave Winer

Dave Winer gave this morning's keynote. I'd never seen him in person, and he seems like a decent guy—certainly a far cry from the screeds he's left on various weblogs and mailing lists. Unsurprisingly, he made reference to the whole......

Sun 02 May 2004

Andrew Grumet FUDs about Atom

Andrew Grumet, a developer and friend of Dave Winer, has a go at Atom. This proceeds attacks by John Robb, Adam Curry, and the constant Stop Energy efforts of Dave Winer. When Atom started, I promised myself, and indirectly Sam Ruby, that I wouldn't...

Mon 30 Aug 2004

Dave Winer

I had to look much harder to find this comment. [link] This is valuable data. And no wince-producing ad hominems to deal with. Maybe now it's time to start working together for real, instead of just...

Mon 04 Apr 2005

Tue 21 Feb 2006

RSS Gets an Enema

For a myriad of reasons, the specification for RSS has been either too loose or too constipated, depending on your point of view. The frustrations around what is valid or not valid in RSS have caused many tempests in the syndication teacup over the...

Wed 21 Jun 2006

Can Publishers Survive in an RSS Age?

I found this internetnews.com article interesting. In a nutshell: content publishers need advertising revenue, RSS simplifies and atomizes publishing, and changes the game of publishing. Publishers are embracing RSS but confused by its implications....

Mon 17 Jul 2006

Sam Ruby: Funky RSS?

Thu 26 Jul 2007

By: Armitage Shanks

The beginnings of the RSS soap opera are documented nicely in Mark Pilgrim’s History of the RSS Fork . Funky RSS is also good for a laugh as legions of tea-leaf readers try (unsuccessfully) to divine the Words of Chairman Dave....

Tue 03 Feb 2009

"Just" use POST

Tim Bray : “But maybe Joe needs a bigger club, because I have to admit that limiting myself to GET and POST just doesn’t cause me that much heartburn.” I get asked a lot about PUT v POST, as do other people associated with REST based design. The...

Sat 25 Sep 2010

Why Atom was created

Being part of the community that created Atom is something I look back at with pride. I spent a great deal of time in the Atom community, learning firsthand how open and vendor-neutral standards are created. I taught myself REST while refactoring...